It Would Be So Much Better If…

You know when you’re at the grocery store and the kid rings you up, never actually looks at you and when they’re done, just stand there, staring at the register waiting for you to do something? I usually ask that kid, “How much do I owe you?” Usually they’ll look slightly shocked and grunt out a number, but sometimes they just point at the digital readout thing. I can’t fix that kid, but what about on the web.

There’s a lot of things on the web that are in various states of broken.

The CMS that runs the core data collection at my day job – sorta broken. The fact that almost every time I upload to YouTube, my first attempt fails, and the second try goes fine – kinda broken. When I visit the AT&T site and everything is in some super secret code so I can’t figure out simple things like, “should I downgrade/upgrade my plan?” – mostly broken. Any site where I need Active X installed just to use the site – totally broken. On the web, I can fix things, it’s what I do.

So why do we put up with it? Have we just learned to accept the limitations?

Here’s a few that get to me:

When signing up for something and it waits until I’ve submitted my form to tell me the username is already taken. You should have checked that for me when I left the username field via ajax.

When I submit a form that has a problem and it clears all my data. That usually means I have just left the site.

Ads that take over the page.

That there’s no awesome Windows based rsync client where I can backup stuff to my own server